Humanoid character animation involves the complex animation of fully articulated virtual humans. Animated characters may rely on motion capture or artist-created content and may move in natural and pleasing ways. These animated characters can be used to create complex, data-driven controllers for animating interactive, responsive virtual characters.
The widespread availability of high-quality motion capture data and the maturity of character animation systems have enabled the design of large, complex, virtual worlds. This has paved the way for the next generation of interactive virtual worlds, which include intricate interactions between characters and the environments they inhabit. However, current motion synthesis techniques have not been designed to scale with these complex environments and contact-rich motion sequence. Current automated approaches for motion synthesis cannot be easily extended to address the increase in environment and motion secquence complexity, particularly for interactive applications, such as video games. Because of this difficulty, environment designers are burdened with the task of manually annotating motion semantics in the environment, which helps informs character controllers which motion sequences a character is able to perform and how, thus pruning the search space for motion synthesis. This, however, is very tedious, especially for intricate motion sequences that involve many contacts between the character and the environment geometry.